Sometimes when I read a post, I get the growing feeling that I'm reading the output of an LLM. I can't necessarily define why, although there are the common tells (it's not the em-dashes, it's the load-bearing tapestries). As I do this my desire to read on atrophies, sometimes to the point of revulsion There are tools out there that cliam to be able to tell the difference between LLM-written prose and the old-fashioned biological product. I'm wary of them, partly due skeptism about ...

A spider, when knocked off a wall, doesn’t fall for long. Within milliseconds, it spins a soup of proteins into sturdy climbing gear. Using a thin, shimmering strand of silk, the spider hauls itself back up. The strand is tougher than Kevlar, the synthetic fiber in bike tires and bulletproof vests, and stronger than steel. It’s flexible and biocompatible with human bodies. Source A spider, when knocked off a wall, doesn’t fall for long. Within milliseconds, it spins a soup of proteins i...

tl;dr; chameleon-rs is my Rust implementation of Chameleon for Python web apps. It runs existing templates unchanged, with faster rendering, async support, and support for free-threaded Python. The Chameleon HTML (template) language is one of my favorites. It was the default in Pyramid when I used to use that framework for my projects. I’ve since created fastapi-chameleon and chameleon-flask to allow you to easily use Chameleon on these more modern web frameworks. Why modernize Cham...

In this week's big news (though it's only Wednesday), OpenAI announced a proof that the exponential-time hypothesis is false , with a Lean proof . Later Anthropic released their own paper . Ryan O'Donnell  and Shiva Kintali  posted follow-up proofs, smartly focusing on simplicity rather than getting the best bounds. OpenAI will partner with three of my favorite complexity theorists, Russell Impagliazzo, Mohan Paturi and Ryan Williams to verify and study the proof. I have not verified...

Configuring an effective, auto-adaptive, multi-agent orchestration by assigning anthropomorphic human traits to agents. Configuring an effective, auto-adaptive, multi-agent orchestration by assigning anthropomorphic human traits to agents.

By Praneeth Yenugutala , Victor Dusa , Anastasia Samoilova , Megan Ren , Justin Wei , Marcelo Mayworm At Netflix, data and machine learning practitioners run millions of workloads each day across orchestration systems and compute engines such as Titus, Spark, Trino, and Druid. On peak days, roughly 100,000 workloads fail. When workloads fail, the failure itself is only the beginning. Someone still needs to find the useful signal in several logs, decide whether the cause sits in their code...

A huge problem I encounter with Magic: The Gathering (MTG) is that there are thousands of cards in the game (around 33000 unique cards as of the time of writing). Depending on the format you play, you may be required to select a limited subset of these cards to play with. A common social format is the Cube draft or Cube. You and a group select and refine ~300-700 cards to create a custom set. While many players enjoy the process of selecting and refining every single card, I usually know a few...

After hiking up to the end of the ridge, it was now time to scout the initial part. The starting point is some 25km east of where I parked the car last time around, at the parking spot of the Italian ossuary in the lovely town of Kobarid. The plan is to walk my way up till the beginning of the ridge, reaching Starijski Vrh at the foothills of Mount Stol, the highest point of the entire ridge, at 1673 meters. The reason why I’m doing this hike is that I read conflicting information abou...

LONDON (October 29, 2026) — Shield today announced an agreement with Leonardo under which Leonardo will use Shield’s Hivemind software to further develop autonomy capabilities for integration onto Proteus, Leonardo’s autonomous uncrewed rotorcraft. The agreement expands Leonardo’s tools to build its own mission autonomy software for new and existing systems. Using the Hivemind Software Development Kit (SDK), the two companies will work together to integrate the software so Leonardo e...

I've written before about how November 2025 was an inflection point for coding agents - the point where Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.1 crossed a tipping point that meant their respective coding agents became reliable daily drivers for software engineers. I think we've reached a new inflection point in October 2026, and this time it's for vibe coding computer games . Tree Appreciator Emberwick Battle Drones Pumpkin Farmer, aka Quarter Sun Cove Four times as insulting What happ...

The apartment is packed up and empty and I'm leaving New York for Durham this Saturday. Just short of my 9th full year here. People, visitors mostly I guess, seem to associate New York with skyscrapers and traffic and concrete. To me New York is the water. Looking out from Astoria Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Fort Totten Park, Orchard Beach, the parks on both sides of the Hudson, (JFK) Boulevard East, Shore Road Park, and the Belt Parkway looking out at Jamaica Bay. Looking out from the ferries...

Since this will be the only source of this process on the Internet 1 , I figured I'd document a quick fan swap I did on a piece of test/reference equipment I'm running in my Atomic Clock Tower . I took my Torx T10 screwdriver and popped off the top cover. The screws required some force to loosen, as they were all secured with Loctite. The inside is simple and serviceable. There's a SpectraTime GRClok-1500 , with an integrated timing-grade GPS module, and a stabilized 10 MHz output 2...

A lot of software spends its time mapping strings to values. A web server must identify the HTTP method ( GET , POST , …). It must recognize header names. A URL parser must recognize the protocol ( http , https , ftp , …). A compiler must recognize keywords. In C++, the default approach is to put the strings in a std::unordered_map . std :: unordered_map methods = { { "GET" , Method :: GET }, { "POST" , Method :: POST }, { "PUT" , Method :: PUT }, { "...

I am sorry to announce that the message.casa service will soon be closing. 2026-10-25 9:40 Some people have taken advantage of the service’s anonymity to send threatening messages that have been classified as terrorist in nature by governmental agencies. Moderation, which I had hoped would be a one-off, is becoming very difficult to manage. It is no longer possible to create new accounts on the platform, and it will be permanently closed on 31 December 2026. For your information, the reput...

Thought I’d make a quick blog post about some weird behavior I’m seeing on iOS 27 and Dynamic Island live activities, that I initially thought was restricted to the Duo, but turns out affects everything. Yay. Maybe this post can save some others some time, and hopefully Apple can fix it. Long story short, ever since iOS 16.1 introduced “Live Activities”, where we can display handy little widgets in the Dynamic Island, there’s been a bunch of different configurations for showing thing...

Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust ) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying [W]e should be more ambitious 1 with the software we build There is, understandably, a lot of skepticism about projects like pgrust because there are so many low-quality AI-generated projects out there. If I didn't know Malis and didn't look into it, I would just assume that pgrust was another vibe slopped project that's never going to work. But I know Malis well enough to tr...

Our AppleTV has proved perfectly serviceable for the decade we’ve had it, but… actually, scratch that, besides its mediocre remote, it’s been excellent. Apple could have abandoned it years ago and forced us to upgrade, but it’s still been getting patches and new features this whole time. That feels unusual in our current world of planned obsolescence, enshittification, and everyone’s favourite two letters of the Latin alphabet, so it’s worth calling out. Good job, Cupertino. That w...

Have you seen this ? If you haven't, you should. I think everyone needs to. Wealth inequality on a scale this extreme is almost impossible to explain. You have to experience it to understand. Go ahead. Try it out . Where is the top of this graph? Good question. Keep scrolling up. Last time I did this it took me 12 minutes and 51 seconds, but the whole time I had a way out. We get a button on the screen that lets us punch out any time we want: I quit . But do other Americans get an easy...

One of the most important skills in working with AI is agency : being willing to try new and ambitious things. This is true for what you build, but it’s also true for how you build. AI models are improving so quickly that most of us are bottlenecked 1 on noticing that AI agents can help automate particular tasks. Here are some examples of that from my daily work. Asking the agent to run my dev server. Agents are very good at fixing weird dev environment issues because they work fast, ...

What will we do after the Singularity? The standard answer is: “we’ll just hang out”. The infinite vacation, as in the Culture novels. I think this won’t work. “Hanging out” implies: Other people exist. They want to hang out with you. You want to hang out with them. And the post-scarcity, infinite vacation AI utopia undermines all these assumptions. Other people exist The social processes by which people come together and build relationships will disappear...

It’s good to get outside, unplug from it all, and spend time with the birds. Sometimes they’re friendly! 📷 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 200mm f /4 🎞️ Kodak Ultramax 400 It’s good to get outside, unplug from it all, and spend time with the birds. Sometimes they’re friendly! 📷 Olympus OM-20, Zuiko 200mm f /4 🎞️ Kodak Ultramax 400 It’s good to get outside, unplug from it all, and spend time with the birds. Someti...

Someone stated in the early days of the war, a feeling that was reciprocated by the soldier in khaki and the sailor in blue, that a mechanical device would be the determining factor in ending the world conflict, favorably, of course, for the United States and her allies. 1 One of my common topics is the history of nuclear weapons . The "atom bomb" is a rich vein of history because its impact has been as much cultural as technical. Dramatic depictions like Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer...

The Great Day of His Wrath, by John Martin, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at minimum lot sizes, Boeing’s next 737 MAX, Fervo short sellers, Figure AI’s training data, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. No essay this week, but I’m working on a piece about manufacturing isotopes that should be o...